Ozon’s drama mixes implied horror with sentimentality as it examines dangerous secrets and the disastrous ramifications of an (accidental?) poisoning

That amazingly prolific film-maker François Ozon returns with an intriguing, if tonally uncertain, mystery drama about a suspected murder. In it, the implied Chabrol-esque horror is made to coexist with an odd mood of gentleness and even sentimentality as we witness the loneliness of an ageing woman with secrets and regrets in the autumn of her life.

This is Michelle, played by 81-year-old actor-director Hélène Vincent; at one point, Ozon allows us to notice she is reading a book by Ruth Rendell, whose thrillers were famously adapted by Claude Chabrol ( La Cérémonie , The Bridesmaid ) and indeed by Ozon himself ( The New Girlfriend ). This film is not a Rendell adaptation, but I wonder if Ozon and his co-screenwriter Philippe Piazzo were inspired by the Rendell short story Means of Evil, which also involved mushroom poisoning and a fall from a balcony.

It’s a chaotic start to the third blood-soaked series. Plus: the concluding part of the shocking spycops scandal. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, Sky Atlantic
The goriest gang drama in recent times – starring Joe Cole, Michelle Fairley and Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù (above) – returns for a third series, as blood-soaked as ever. London’s criminal underworld is still at war for control (shocker!) and the chaos is turned up when clubbers who have sniffed things they shouldn’t get one hell of a Just Say No lesson. With accusations of a spiked shipment, trouble erupts as alliances and enemies are made. Hollie Richardson

Artists might cancel shows, donors withdraw and audiences flee. It all plays into the hands of his authoritarian project

In Washington, Donald Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center – the US’s imposing national centre for the performing arts – presents a bizarre, unnerving and, at times, bleakly comical spectacle. Last month, he announced himself its new chair, replaced 13 board members, and inserted a new interim president , foreign policy adviser Richard Grenell. On Monday this week, the president’s motorcade disgorged him at the building – which contains an opera house, theatre, concert hall and a plethora of smaller venues off its towering, chandelier-hung foyers. By this point, his and Melania Trump’s portraits, alongside those of vice-president JD Vance and his wife Usha, had been screwed to the wall beside the concert hall stage door.

Trump and his new trustees – who include Usha Vance and Fox presenter Laura Ingraham – then discussed changes to the Kennedy Center Honors , founded in the 1970s to recognise the greatest figures in American cultural life. Trump called previous honorees, who have ranged from Fred Astaire to Francis Ford Coppola, “ radical left lunatics ”. Men such as singer Andrea Bocelli, who has performed at Mar-a-Lago, and Sylvester Stallone, who recently called Trump a “second George Washington”, were floated for future honours. With the truculence of a slighted schoolboy, Trump opined that he had never much cared for Hamilton – this, after the news that the musical has withdrawn from a 2026 run at the centre. He also complained about an infestation of mice. All this, the day before he was due to speak to Russian president Vladimir Putin to haggle over Ukraine’s future. It is enough to give you a political-cultural attack of the bends.

Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer

Orange is the New Black’s Uzo Aduba is funny to her marrow in this wild, witty whodunnit set in the White House. It’s a very happy experience indeed … right down to the cameo from Kylie!

Like a locked-room mystery, do you? How about a 132-locked-rooms mystery, with more than 150 murder suspects? Settle in for some uber-Christie with comic knobs on, courtesy of Shondaland’s latest production: The Residence, a bonkers whodunnit written by Paul William Davies (who worked with Shonda Rhimes on her most famous creation, Scandal) and starring the magnificently inimitable Uzo Aduba, who appears to be having almost as much fun as her audience. The Residence is a very happy experience all round – moreish, bingeable, a complete tonic.

Aduba, known for her portrayal of Crazy Eyes in Orange Is the New Black, is more than capable of inducing emotional devastation in the viewer, but she is also funny to her marrow, as we see here. She plays Cordelia Cupp, a brilliant detective (and keen birdwatcher and, er, sardine-eater) called in to investigate the death of the White House’s chief usher, AB Wynter (Giancarlo Esposito). His body is found in the private quarters of the presidential building while a state dinner designed to repair fracturing relations with Australia unfolds below. (The Australian prime minister is played by Nip/Tuck’s Julian McMahon, who is the son of the country’s 20th PM, Sir William McMahon. How about that, fact fans?)

About 70 pages of director’s handwritten notes for the New Wave classic were found after more than 60 years

The only known script for Jean-Luc Godard’s seminal New Wave film Breathless (À Bout de Souffle) will be auctioned later this year after coming to light for the first time in more than 60 years.

About 70 pages of Godard’s handwritten notes and synopses of some of the most famous scenes, including the movie’s dramatic opening, were discovered in the estate of the celebrated producer Georges de Beauregard.

Schoenfeld Theatre, New York

The 1997 album that later became a hit documentary now reaches the stage in a play with thrilling music performances but a lacking script

Was it restraint or oversight that resulted in Buena Vista Social Club taking nearly 30 years to reach Broadway? The project began as a 1997 album, a surprise smash that introduced a supergroup of veteran Cuban musicians, assembled to play classics from the 1940s; subsequent performances (and interviews with the participants) were chronicled in a hit 1999 documentary from Wim Wenders. Jumping all the way to 2025 for a Broadway production might initially seem akin to a splashy new musical covering the formation of third-wave ska. But maybe now is the right time to hand this material over to Broadway; many of the original musicians are sadly departed, and the stage show serves as a (mostly) non-cheesy tribute act. Accordingly, Buena Vista Social Club on Broadway has both an emotional charge and a refreshing lack of bombast compared with other productions attempting to replicate pop culture phenomena.

The story is simple; even with a dual timeline approach, it’s over and done in about two hours, including intermission. In 1996, a producer gathers musicians including Ibrahim Ferrer (Mel Semé), Rubén González (Jainardo Batista Sterling), and Compay Segundo (Julio Monge) to work on an album paying tribute to the music of their youth, and hopes to recruit the retired and reluctant Omara Portuondo (Natalie Venetia Belcon) to sing with them. In late-1950s flashbacks, the Cuban revolution approaches and threatens to upend the lives of those same musicians in Havana, with a focus on the relationship between Omara (Isa Antonetti) and her sister Haydee (Ashley De La Rosa). Haydee wants the duo to sign a deal with Capitol Records and escape the country; Omara, on the other hand, is enticed by the tourist-free social clubs where her new musician friends play music for themselves – for the Cuban people.

Investigation uncovered eight adverts that portrayed women in a harmful or degrading way, says ASA

An investigation by the UK advertising watchdog has found a number of shocking ads in mobile gaming apps that depict women as sexual objects, use pornographic tropes, and feature non-consensual sexual scenarios involving “violent and coercive control”.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) used avatars, which mimic the browsing behaviour of different gender and age groups, to monitor ads served when mobile games are open and identify breaches of the UK code.

Yael van der Wouden, Seán Hewitt, Yasmin Zaher and Rebecca Watson also in running for Swansea University’s £20,000 writers’ award, with winner announced on 15 May

Eley Williams, Yael van der Wouden and Ferdia Lennon are among the young writers shortlisted for this year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize.

Seán Hewitt, Yasmin Zaher and Rebecca Watson also made the shortlist for the £20,000 award, which celebrates fiction in any form – including novels, short stories, poetry and drama – by writers aged 39 or under in honour of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who died at that age.

A new study examining meme creation found that AI-generated meme captions on existing famous meme images scored higher on average for humor, creativity, and "shareability" than those made by people. Even so, people still created the most exceptional individual examples.

The research, which will be presented at the 2025 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces , reveals a nuanced picture of how AI and humans perform differently in humor creation tasks. Still, the results were surprising enough to have one expert declaring victory for the machines.

"I regret to announce that the meme Turing Test has been passed," wrote Wharton professor Ethan Mollick on Bluesky after reviewing the study results. Mollick studies AI academically, and he's referring to a famous test proposed by computing pioneer Alan Turing in 1950 that seeks to determine whether humans can distinguish between AI outputs and human-created content.

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